Announcing ZoomaRooma.com

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Just in time for your way back from holiday travels is a new and innovative way of finding hotels and comparing prices.

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http://ZoomaRooma.com is a new Google Maps mashup of hotels. The site focuses on the three things that consumers are typically most interested in: location, image of hotel, and price. This focus on basics allows a consumer to very quickly find the best hotel and book the room. The site also provides convenient links into the hotel's own website for a more in-depth investigation or to book a room. Savvy users will be able to quickly zoom in and out from place to place and get a quick visual to see if a hotel is near the beach or interstate or near the convention center that they are attending. There are currently 10,600 hotels loaded from three of the largest hotel companies: Hilton Hotels Corporation, Marriott International, Inc., and InterContinental Hotels Group.

Methods of searching for items continue to evolve. Steve Sullivan, creator of zoomarooma.com, explains: "Originally, websites had lists and categories, and your mind would have to scan through the list to find what you are looking for." Most sites that have a considerable amount of items, such as hotels, have adapted a series of fields for users to type in to narrow down their searches. When searching for hotels, for example, a user would type in a city (careful not to misspell) to narrow the site's list of hotels to that city. The user must then narrow down that list with specific requirements such as beachfront, etc. ZoomaRooma.com is a more visual and less cumbersome way of searching than manually filling in fields and sorting through lists. If a user wants that hotel on the beach, he can literally see the hotels that are on the beach, in map, satellite, or hybrid view, without having to decipher descriptions from lists of hotels. With ZoomaRooma.com a user can manipulate the map by drag and pan, zoom, and click without ever using the keyboard. In fact, in most cases a user will be all the way to the guest information page of the reservation process without ever having used the keyboard.

One very interesting feature of ZoomaRooma.com is the way it loads hotels dynamically as users drag the map to a new location. Once a person has moved the map past the point where markers were loaded into the buffer, there is a slight pause followed by a fresh retrieval of hotel markers. This dynamic loading feature allows for optimal performance without hindering usability.